Trademarking somethin'

[false_Aest]

Heyo,

Anyone have experience trademarking stuff? Anyone a lawyer that deals with this stuff?

Got a bike-related question for ya.

[rugbysecondrow]

I have a guy I have worked with for patent stuff who also does trademark, PM me if you want his info.

Paul

[SoCalSteve]

Start here:

http://www.uspto.gov/trademarks-application-process/search-trademark-database

[ptourkin]

Start here:

http://www.uspto.gov/trademarks-application-process/search-trademark-database

I'm a lawyer and I've done it but you should be able to register a simple mark yourself if you start at the uspto link. I had no particular knowledge of this area when I did it. If there's an issue where it may be borderline infringing etc... that's when you might want to talk with an attorney.

[false_Aest]

Start here:

http://www.uspto.gov/trademarks-application-process/search-trademark-database


I already started there. Need a bit more info.

[Repack Rider]

In 1979 Gary Fisher and I rented a garage to build bikes in. Tom Ritchey was building a new kind of bike frame, and Gary and I assembled the bikes and sold them for him. We called our two-man company "MountainBikes (http://sonic.net/~ckelly/Seekay/mtbikes_company.htm)." One word with the uppercase "B," like a logo. I paid a trademark attorney $125 to protect that name for us.

After filing the two-page application, the attorney got a letter back from the Commerce Department, which handles trademarks. It was a question, are these bicycles made to be used only in the mountains?

The attorney agreed that indeed these were bicycles made to use in the mountains. It turns out that you can't trademark a description, such as "red car." That is the kind of thing you pay a trademark specialist attorney to know, and he didn't know it. All he had to say was, no, you can ride these bikes anywhere, that the "mountain" in the logo is to suggest toughness. Something like that. But he didn't. He said they were bikes only to be used in the mountains.

So "MountainBikes" became a description, not a company name. That is why our trademark was denied, and you can call your machine a "mountain bike" without having to pay me and Gary Fisher a royalty.

There is a little more to the story. Only Gary and I and the attorney knew we didn't have a trademark on the name "MountainBikes." We managed to bluff the entire bicycle industry for at least a year. At the time, Gary was working for Bicycling Magazine, which was a conflict of interest but worked in our favor. Gary convinced the editors of Bicycling that if they called these new bikes "mountain bikes," it was an infringement.

In 1980 Bicycling had a contest, announced on the editorial page, to name this new generation of fat-tire, off-road bikes, since they didn't care to call them...uh, that other name. Two months later the results were in. From that issue forward, they would be All-Terrain Bikes or ATBs.

If you say so. But nobody ever call them ATBs. The name "mountain bike" was so good that it had become generic.

After a while, somebody did a trademark search and the jig was up, anybody could make a "mountain bike." But who gets to put something permanently in the dictionary?